Friday, March 28, 2008

Recently, Zach Franzen, our once-peaceful Keeper of the Blog here at Portland Studios, in a moment supreme enlightenment, discovered that civilization, as a concept, is best described with the tea. (strange, I know, bear with me) When he arrived at this illumination, he was immediately impelled on a terrible, terrible crusade. In a stupor, he went downstairs to the Dollar General and acquired ten thousand packets of the most inferior and evil looking tea I have ever seen. He threw all those packets (and a rock badger and a spare tire) into a huge vat and boiled them for 3 days and nights. When he was finished he brought in a super concentrated brew of semi-liquid death and held all of the artists here at gunpoint, forcing us to paint pictures of "civilization" with only this evil concoction of his. Waving an AK-47 in the air he cried repeatedly, "Either you paint with this bulwark of civilization, or I'll make you drink it! What's it gonna be people!?" He threw out all our computers, he burned our pencils and he flushed all the watercolors down the drain. I hid under my desk while he cried, "In the new millennia, there will be, only TEA! No longer shall we wear the stains of our high fructose corn syrup! No longer the cold, synthetic hum of fluorescent lights! No longer shall we be shackled to the chains of these poisons and greasy black machines! NO! Society will be green! Civilization will be pure! No longer bereft of the blessed sap we, as a collective body, united in Tea, shall be transported to new heights! TEA! TEA! TEA!" Fearing for my internal organs, I painted...

He has written his sinister manifesto on the Portland blog, for any who are discerning enough to see through his glittering generalities to the underlying poison written between those tea-stained lines.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Later this year, Portland hopes to release a few more t-shirt designs. As part of my ongoing campaign to convince mainstream America that their television sets are actually alien mind-control devices, I submitted this design.